That other project that we are taking into our program wants to do 3 week sprints. They have 6 weeks to deliver. If they take 3 week sprints they will have only 2 iterations with 2 week sprints they get 3! With 3 there is time to adjust and adapt to what comes from iteration 1.

I think short sprints also add little excitement into work, since working for long on same thing can make you bore and absolutely breaking your tasks helps you over come the boring part.

How about teams which achieve their milestones before the time lines, that worries me some time to ask a question, are we really doing it the right way? or building a right product? how would you mitigate that risk of integration test failure?

Totally! isn’t that why we call it a SPRINT? lol If it is too long it becomes a Cross Country run, still challenging but not as exciting

It is a good idea to have the team retrospect about it if they complete their goals early. Teams typically should only take on about 80% of the work that they think they can do in a sprint. this makes it more likely that they will make their goals and if they get done early (synergy is an amazing thing) then they can pull more work out of the prioritized backlog.

As far as integration test failure. the key is to integrate early and often. My team is moving to daily (or even intra-day) integration. Ken Schwaber told me a story about a team he had that used a Lava Lamp. They did an integration builds at checkin. If your build breaks, the team tried to fix the build before the lava lamp heated up. This encourages smaller changes and more frequent builds, making for more stable products. Test suites run at build.

I was relieved to hear such unanimity on the panel Joseph. When I started doing scrum a few years back we eventually moved to one week sprints and I loved how fast we iterated our process as a result.

I think of short iterations like fruit flies in the study of genetics. The shorter the life-span the faster mutations appear. Meaning the faster you can inspect and adapt (which for me is the most important piece of any Agile conversion).

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